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Sunday, July 9, 2017

AMAZON still claims it is PRIME 2 day delivery (or 1 day delivery) . Go lookup the current Item (or items), it still claims 24-hour, sameday,or 2-day delivery, but what I get is 5-day delivery. I'm not saying it is a scam, but you tell me?

Thursday, September 4, 2014

Virtual machines - UUID or InstanceUUID

Historically, Unique ID's or serial numbers have been a challenge within VMware. The lack of Uniqueness limited the number of objects vCenter could manage and the inability to uniquely identify Virtual Machine utilization for asset control.

In the early days of version 3 Virtual Center, VMware virtual machines were unique identified by a managed object reference ID (called a MoREF). MoREF's were were limited to 99 instances and duplicates easily occured. vCenter 4.* came along and several changes were introduced. The Virtual Machine object history of unique identification was as follows

Virtual Center 3- MoREF's were expanded to 999, but that didn't sufficiently reduce duplicates or allow for more than 999 vm's per vCenter.

Virtual Center 4. * UuID was introduced. When a VM is created, ESXi creates the 128-bit integer Uuid such as: 421b4187-bcb4-3dc1-e7d7-c9496d3fdca9 The UUID was how vCenter 4.* tracked a Virtual Machines. This failed however, because duplicates occur during VM copy or cloning.

vCenter 4.1 (if I recall correctly) the PersistentID was introduced as a more Persistent identifier.

vCenter 5.* - PersistentID was changed to InstanceUuid. Therefore, the InstanceUuID is, as of vCenter and ESXi version 5.0, 5.1, and 5.5 is unique. Duplicates for UUID and MOREF may still occur due to replication, copy, or cloning processes.

The InstanceUuid, formerly known as PersistentID before it was deprecated, is best known method for unique identification of a virtual machine within a vCenter or a collection of vCenters.

The InstanceUuid is not visible through the vCenter Client, but it is visible through the vCenter API (SDK) or through PowerCLI.

Example

If connected to a vCenter or ESXi host through PowerCLI, here's a code snippet to view both the UuID and the PersistentID:

Vmware has pretty much screwed up Host Profiles. It worked great in 4.0. Got worse with 5.0/5.1. It's no better in 5.5. The mitigating aspect of HostProfiles is that you can script away with PowerCLI most of the HostProfile frailties. That said, why use HostProfiles at all if you can standardize a VMhost configuration with scripts?

BLOATED with Samsung features that are too complicated to use (such as Allshare)

BLOATED with Samsung junkware applications

Full Root not available :( however, system root is available.

The fact that Verizon locks these phones and stuffs them with Verizon junk and tracking software suggests to me that their intention is to 100% control your experience. What if I don't want to use the phone the way Samsung or Verizon wants? It's a long standing gripe,

The above line will simply return all VM's with Snapshots. It's that simple, and it's very fast. Next the results are piped to a Where filter.

Notice the "$VM" variable? Use it to filter your script by VM names, and remember this that field is a regular expression, so you can't use the typical wild card (* or ?) characters. Normally, the -Filter array would contain "Name"="$VM", but doing that here would present an "OR" filter statement which would return wrong results. So we filter on found items in Get-View.

? { $_.name -match "$VM" }

The final statement is a Select statement massages the results into these kind of results:

VM

vCenter

Snapshots

SnapsSizeGB

OldestSnapshot

DaysOld

Windows2003r2_Std_Tpl

vc2wrvc06.int.loc

2

0.00

20/28/2022 2:56:22 PM

527

2622PPPHMR3

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

2

22.00

6/22/2022 3:59:26 PM

290

2622PPPH2

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

2

72.00

7/28/2022 7:33:36 PM

263

2650ppph2

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

2

72.00

7/28/2022 7:35:02 PM

263

2572ppph2

vc2wrvc02.int.loc

2

72.00

7/28/2022 7:32:25 PM

263

ar2550ppph2

vc2wrvc02.int.loc

2

72.00

7/28/2022 2:32:40 PM

263

2568xptest2

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

2

6.05

2/6/2023 20:38:56 PM

60

2568XPTEST3

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

2

24.20

2/23/2023 5:24:22 PM

53

2568XPTEST4

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

2

22.05

2/23/2023 5:24:06 PM

53

0223CTXWEB02

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

2

22.05

2/28/2023 20:55:03 PM

48

0223CTXWEB02

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

3

36.25

2/20/2023 9:53:43 PM

46

0223CTXSQL02

vc2wrvc03.int.loc

2

22.05

2/22/2023 9:56:39 PM

44

2568CTXWEB04

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

2

0.00

2/26/2023 7:56:02 PM

40

2706AMRSCN21

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

2

9.05

3/26/2023 7:00:54 PM

22

2568AMRDBE02

vc2wrvc04.int.loc

0

0.00

4/4/2023 22:08:25 AM

4

One problem I find is the snapshot size. The Get-View VirtualMachine object returns LayoutEx.File objects, but these objects do not report the same size disk as the Get-Snapshot returns.

However, when I visually inspect the actual snapshot disk on the VMFS volume, I find that LayoutEx.File size is accurate and the Get-Snapshot is incorrect. If I'm missing something, let me know.